One Day on Mars s-1

by Travis S. Taylor

  "Helmsman, can you compensate the yaw?"

  "Ma'am! We're crabbin' it in but they can't hit us hard enough to stop us now!"

  "Good! Stay on it, Lee!" Fullback looked at the incoming missile tracks in her DTM virtual view and did some numbers in her head. The CO keyed the 1MC. "This is gonna be a rough ride! Everybody strap in for impact now!"

  "Ma'am, we just lost propulsion!" the young ensign at the helm shouted.

  "Just hang on, Ensign Lee!"

  The Seppy hauler could no longer be seen from end to end as it rushed upward toward the listing supercarrier at several hundred kilometers per hour. The window and the viewscreens were filled with the collision view as the nose of the supercarrier dug into the hull plating of the enemy hauler. The nose of the hauler gave way to the momentum of the supercarrier forward decks and the impact flung the entire crew of the ship against their restraints so hard that the navigator was killed instantly from the impact of his brain slamming against the inside of his own skull. The inertial dampening field caught up a microsecond too late for him.

  But for the captain and Helmsman Lee it might have saved their lives. The force of the impact was muted by the dampening field just quick enough that Helmsman Lee's left arm was crushed against her console and both clavicles were snapped through and through. Splinters of her right clavicle pierced the top of her lungs. The swishing of her internal organs against her restraints ruptured her spleen and bruised her kidneys and bladder.

  "Oh God!" Helmsman Lee screamed in agony and fear until the navigator's console tore loose and slammed into the side of her head, knocking her unconscious for the moment.

  "Get some!" Fullback held on, screaming a guttural battle cry at the top of her lungs as several of her bulging muscles ruptured from the strain. Her left leg was broken from behind as a chair mooring tore from the deck and cut into her calf muscle, bruising it and snapping the bone. The bone forced through the front of her shin, causing bright red blood to squirt on the deck with each heartbeat. Fullback screamed in pain only briefly and pounded her right fist into the captain's chair madly to distract her from the pain and sheer terror.

  Metal on metal screeching and breaking and clanging sounds vibrated and rang out through the ship at deafening levels. The inertial dampening field was keeping up but it was still a very rough ride as the supercarrier continued to tear forward into the giant Seppy hauler. It tore and grinded and screeched its way until the forward decks actually poked through to the other side, and then it stopped any forward motion and continued on the fall with the hauler. The angular precession of the hauler was brought almost to a stop by the added unbalanced mass but there was not enough momentum exchange to cause the now combined mass of the two ships to tumble.

  Secondary explosions erupted in a rainbow of plasma colors and sparks across the decks and throughout both of the decimated behemoth ships as they approached the Martian atmosphere. Captain Walker looked out the window and could see hull debris and torn metal bunched up against and around the deck of the supercarrier where it impaled the Seppy hauler. There was also blood on the window in places from where the XO's body slammed into it on impact. Debris that had been thrown free of the ships were already glowing red and ablating due to reentry heat. And large shards of metal hull plating that hung loosely from the wreckage flailed and flopped wildly from the heating and aerodynamics of reentry and Fullback could see several very large chunks of hull from each ship peel away and fly off behind them.

  The friction from reentry heated the armored windowscreens, but the structural integrity fields of the strong ship held. The bridge environment systems flushed the room with cold air to adjust for the rapid heating. Fullback gritted her teeth from the pain and tried to put it out of her mind. She had to make certain her mission had been accomplished and then see if there was a way to survive this mess.

  Marley! Give me all the SIF power on the bridge that you can! If there are other rooms that have been plussed up don't rob them, there might be survivors in there. Can you check?

  I'm checking it, Captain. Sensors are failing everywhere but I show forty-seven crewmen still on board in various locations.

  What about our trajectory? Did we push the hauler out from over the city? Obviously, the goddamned thing didn't blow up.

  Sorry, Captain, all external sensors are down. We do have QM comms.

  You're our only hope now, Marley. Keep us alive if you can. We'll need extreme inertial dampening when we hit the ground!

  I understand, ma'am.

  Open a channel to the Madira.

  Aye sir.

  "CO Madira! CO Thatcher!"

  "Holy shit, Fullback! You're still alive!" Captain Jefferson squawked back.

  "Probably not for much longer, Captain. Propulsion is down and we're stuck to the Seppy rust bucket." Fullback grimaced at the pain in her leg. "Did it work? External sensors are down over here, Wally. Did we push the hauler out of the way?"

  "Is there any way you can get out of there, Sharon?"

  "Negative, Wally. All the escape pods are down and I probably couldn't make it to one anyway. Besides, I couldn't leave Helmsman Lee behind. Did we save the city, Wally?"

  Chapter 24

  2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

  "What was that?" Rod heard a sound almost like an insect buzz overhead. Spitap, spitap, went the sound again. "Did you hear that?" He turned to the pregnant lady, Carla, on the park bench beside him and then shrugged at Vincent.

  "I heard something. I thought it was just my damn ears ringing from my nicotine withdrawals." Vincent replied. Then a wave of people rushed toward them, forcing them to push the people around them off the young lady. "Get the fuck off me!" he yelled, and turned to the man pushing at his back and punched him square in the face.

  "What the fuck is wrong with you?" Carla screamed and Rod and Vincent did their level best to protect her.

  "Let's stay ahead of this rushing crowd instead of fighting it." Vincent grabbed Carla by the hand and pulled her with him. "Rod. Get behind her, bud!" Vincent had been in enough adrenaline-hyped gliderchute afterparties when people started moshing in the pit to know that you can't fight a crowd.

  The three of them pushed their way along with the wave of the crowd as they passed through the park. They were being pushed toward the central elevator of the Open Court near the giant JumboHoloTron. Mons City Central Park had been designed to hold eighty thousand but there were more than a hundred thousand, or maybe twice that being held in it with Seppy force fields. There was little more than standing room and with the wave of the crowd moving there had to be hundreds or maybe thousands of people being trampled to death.

  Vincent jumped up as high as he could in an attempt to see over the crowd. It didn't help much. All he could see was wave after wave of people behind him and the force field closing in on them from the far side of the park.

  "The motherfucking Seppy motherfuckers are squeezing the force field on us. They're gonna squish us all!" Vincent said in a panic. He really wished he and Rod had gone with that senator fellow earlier when they had had the chance.

  "Why are they doing that?" Carla screamed.

  "I don't know!" Vincent continued along with the wave of the crowd jumping up as often as space would allow between him and the next guy. He was very careful not to lose his footing though. Falling down could be the end of them.

  "We gotta think of something fast, Vince!" Rod jumped and looked over the crowd ahead of them and could see a wave in the sea of people headed back toward them. The forcefields were closing in from all around. "Vince, we can't keep going with the crowd. We have to get to the center of the park and stay there as long as we can hold out."

  Zip, zip, zip.

  Separatist railgun rifle rounds tore through the crowds of people splattering the corralled citizens like the old expression "shooting fish in a barrel." The automatic railgun fire was coming from above the crowd on the third floor near the elevator and from other upper floor loca
tions around the periphery of the park.

  "Goddamned cowards!" A man behind them held his fist in the air and shook it defiantly at the Seppy snipers. "Come down here and fight like men!"

  Rod, Vincent, and Carla struggled to push toward the center of the crowd and prayed that the luck of large numbers would fall their way. There were thousands more people in the park than there were snipers and it would take them a while to kill them all considering the ranges they were shooting from and size of the park itself. The force fields continued pressing inward, knocking over trees and park benches and play sets and monkey bars and other park constructions.

  Several people realized what Vince, Rod, and Carla's strategy was and they also noticed Carla's condition and began forming a pocket around her. They kept a hand on each other's shoulders to hold the pocket together. A zipping sound passed by Vince's left ear and he felt something wet splatter his face. He turned to see the man beside him and saw clean through a dark gray and red outlined hole in the man's head and through the chest of the woman behind him. The two victims were pressed together by the crowd and couldn't fall over at first. Then they were drawn down to be trampled under thousands of stampeding human feet.

  Vincent and crew continued to protect Carla as best they could. There were pockets forming in the crowd where the Seppy HVAR rounds had cleared them out.

  "This way!" Vincent pushed back toward one of the growing pockets of dead.

  "Are you fuckin' nuts," Carla screamed. "That's toward the gunfire!"

  "Watch those little vapor trails streaking across the park. They fire for a few seconds and then they stop. And then they do it again." Vincent pushed them toward the nearest wave of people rushing away from the gunfire.

  "They're reloading?" Rod asked. "Yeah, so! Then we'll be standing in the open and easier to shoot."

  "Not if we play dead." Vincent said. "When I say drop. Drop. Rod, we'll cover Carla as best we can." Vincent hated running into gunfire and lying around playing dead. But it was the only plan he had and at least it was a plan. Before they had just been running scared and aimlessly.

  "Now!" Vincent screamed once he could see only about ten rows of people between him and the oncoming hail of railgun vapor trails. The trails tracked through the rows of people and then stopped for a second. Vince, Rod, Carla, several others fell to the ground and tried to cover each other from being trampled. Several wounded and scared people tripped and kicked at them. One of them landed a knee right into Vincent's back so hard that Vince was afraid he'd be pissing blood, but then the wave of people pushed away from the blood-soaked pile of bodies as the railgun fire started back up.

  A few rounds hit just a few centimeters to Vincent's left but they missed them and they were safe for now. Several of the wounded were screaming in pain around them and some of them even rose and tried to get back to their feet, but the Separatist snipers seemed to care little about them.

  "Oh my God, oh my God!" Carla almost screamed, but managed to keep her voice subdued by biting her hand.

  "Hold it together, honey," a woman lying still next to them said calmly. "They can't hear you that far away and over all these poor wounded bastards screaming. You need to calm yourself or you could force yourself into premature labor." Rod put his arm over her and hugged her, not sure if that would help or not.

  "Are you a doctor?" Carla asked the woman.

  "Naw honey, I've just had a few kids in my day."

  "Okay, Vince. They're not shooting at us right now. But what do we do when the force fields start to close in on us?" Rod asked. His hands were trembling wildly. He was scared to death.

  "I'm working on it, bud, Vincent said. "Holy shit, will you look at that!"

  "What now?!" Rod asked, the panic in his voice never so obvious.

  "Look up through the dome. Now, there is something you don't see every day," Vince said. "What the hell is that?"

  Above them fell a bright glowing red fireball that showered and glittered with thousands of smaller fireballs spraying off of it and around it falling along behind in its path. Initially, Vincent thought it was a meteorite but it was moving too slowly and was way too big for that. A meteor that size and that shape would break up or destroy the planet. Something was holding it together. From the looks of it the giant fireball was the shape of a cross and had to be at least a kilometer or two wide and maybe twice as long. It was glowing brighter and brighter and looming closer and closer.

  The goddamned Seppy bastards never even let up to look at the falling fireball. The HVAR rounds just kept zipping through the crowds of people as fast as they could fire and reload the things. Fortunately for the people trapped in the force fields, the Seppy rifles didn't hold the large magazines that American HVARs did and they were forced to reload more often.

  "Maybe that thing'll fall on us and kill those sorry motherfuckers." Vince said. "Goddamn I wish I had a cigarette."

  Chapter 25

  2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

  "Look at that, Daddy!" Deanna pointed up at the sky at the falling fireball while she sat comfortably in her father's lap. She was so tired of her e-suit and wanted out of it horribly bad, but at least she was with her daddy. Alexander was tired too and had to rest for a few moments. The work of finding wounded was slow and tedious. Moore decided to take a few minutes for himself and his family and then he would rejoin the AEMs and Joanie Hassed in their relief efforts. But to this point, they had found only two survivors and those two were so severely wounded they might not survive if they didn't get real medical attention soon.

  "What the hell?" Flight Gunner Third Class Sammy Jo Tapscott was startled by the scene when she looked up from inflating the environment dome. "Vulcan, you want me to check squawk?"

  "My AIC is on it, gunner. You and Yo-yo and Pac just keep working on that shelter," Lieutenant Junior Grade Seri "Vulcan" Cobbs, Angel One of the search-and-rescue squad, replied. They couldn't evac to anywhere right now, so she decided to assemble a staging area with two inflatable environment chambers. "Sounds like it's a Seppy rust bucket and the U.S.S. Margaret Thatcher," she said.

  I'm getting the same information, Senator. The link through BIL is working fine still.

  Thanks, Abigail. Senator Moore looked over at the big metal beast that was sitting beside the two boxy-shaped SH-102 Starhawks near the edge of the Olympus Mons base escarpment.

  Any idea when long-range coms will be back up? Even though they had managed to override the Seppy software spoof on sensors and local coms, the long-range jam had not been stopped yet. Long-range communications still depended on line-of-site, Internet, or QM router-to-router connections.

  I think the battle is still taking precedent right now, Senator.

  Just keep us posted.

  Of course, sir.

  "Well, it looks like it is going to come down right on top of the main dome. My God, all those people," Reyez Jones said. He had put up tents before on overnight safaris across the inhospitable planet and was pretty useful in that regard. He was helping the SARs team with the staging area shelter. One dome was already inflated and the airseam in place. They needed to move the wounded into it soon.

  "Tell me you're getting this, Calvin," the MNN reporter Gail Fehrer asked her cameraman. For her and her cameraman this day had just been getting better and better. She had to get this footage on air as soon as she could. She could just smell Pulitzer.

  "You're getting this, Calvin," Calvin replied.

  "Nobody likes a smartass, Calvin." Gail punched his arm. "Can you zoom in and get a better look at it? And let us see it."

  "Hold on." Calvin had his AIC negotiate with the e-suit visors displays and then had the data QM wirelessed to them. "Look on channel three."

  "All hands, this is the captain. If you are still with us, you have fought well and it has been my honor. Brace for impact! Shit . . . " Squawked over the engine room 1MC intercom of the U.S.S. Margaret Thatcher where Engine Technician Command Master Chief Petty Officer William H. Ed
wards was feverishly rerouting coolant flow loops from all over the ship to keep the engines. Bill had actually been the chief of the boat for more than a year now and was the senior CMC on board the Thatcher, but when the CO gave the abandon ship order he knew that someone had to stay in the engine room and keep the ship flying to the last second. He wasn't about to let any of his junior enlisted men and women do that. After all, CMC Edwards had started the Navy in the engine room. Learning the ins and outs of the propulsion system of the supercarrier had been the only thing that kept him from committing suicide when his wife of twenty-one years had died of rejuvenation cancer, and it was fitting that since he started his career in an engine room that that is where he would end it instead of up on the bridge with the officers. He had always been uneasy up there anyway, though not because of the officers. The CO and the XO and the other command crew were the best, absolute best, but it was too damned clean up there. Bill liked the dirty hard work of keeping the boat running, and the orange heavy coveralls with grip pads in the knees and elbows and grimy smudges across his face fit him much more than the clean and pressed uniforms of the bridge crew. Down below was where he belonged.

  CMC Edwards really did know the supercarrier engine room like the back of his hand. He had spent his first tour as a fireman's apprentice on the Mandela, a deployment as an HT2 on the Washington, and then there was that horrible time on land while he was in school, but at least he had been studying about the propellant drive system for the Navy supercarriers. He left the tech school as engine tech first class, ET1, and then went back to the supercarriers, where he stayed. He had done a stint on the Washington and for two weeks he had been a visitor on the Churchill, learning about some engine upgrades the newest boat in the fleet had implemented.